


Water Flowing Underground

by Balder12



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Castiel's Handprint, M/M, Post Swan Song, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-31
Updated: 2012-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 11:44:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas visits Dean in Cicero.  Cas wants help, Dean wants to know what happened to Cas's hand print.  Neither of them is happy with the answer he gets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Water Flowing Underground

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Once in a Lifetime" by the Talking Heads.

Dean was walking along the side of a Cicero road at 2am, the dark suburban houses watching him with black eyes. The sodium lights overhead washed out the neatly manicured lawns in a flat yellow glow. Occasionally the silhouette of a jack-o-lantern frowned from a walkway. Cardboard skeletons twisted on the porches like hanged men.  
  
The wind sent the dead leaves behind him skittering, and Dean jerked around, ready to fight, heart pounding so hard that his vision grayed at the edges. He knew that there was nothing behind him, nothing in all of Cicero worth being afraid of. He’d checked it over and over again for every kind of supernatural activity, and it was clean. No ghosts in the graveyard, no vampires in the abandoned warehouses, no mermaids in the artificial lake. No crime to speak of, either. And yet these placid, inoffensive streets made him uneasy in a way that even the worst back alleys and the darkest forests never had. He felt a monster lurking behind the silent swing sets and the charcoal grills, vast and indifferent.  
  
It was a cold night, cold enough that Dean’s fingers were red and swollen where they clung to his bottle of Jim Beam, but the anger in his veins ran so hot that he barely felt it. Or maybe that was the whiskey. He’d started drinking as soon as he’d gotten home from the construction site, raw and restless with the need to hunt, to fight, to kill, or maybe just to run, long and hard, as fast as he could, until there was nothing left around him that he recognized. He’d hoped that he could drink himself into submission, or at least unconsciousness–he could, a lot of nights–but the alcohol turned on him. With every glass his fury ratcheted higher, until he could barely restrain the urge to put his fist through the bathroom mirror, or the window, or to pound it against the wall until his bones cracked. He wanted to make something bleed, and he didn’t much care if it was himself.  
  
He’d walked out without a word. He wasn’t safe to be around a woman and a child. Besides, he’d promised Lisa that he wouldn’t get drunk in the house anymore. He knew this wasn’t what she’d had in mind, but it was as close as he could come to respecting her wishes. When he woke up tomorrow morning, or more likely tomorrow afternoon, she would ask him what had happened. Did he want to talk about it? He needed to  _talk_ about it, she always said. She was worse than . . . . Anyway, there was nothing to talk about. Nothing at all.  
  
There was another rustle at Dean’s back. It wasn’t a remarkable sound, not one that an ordinary man would have pegged as supernatural. It could’ve been the leaves. But it wasn’t. It was a sound that Dean hadn’t expected to hear again. He froze. He knew, but he couldn’t make himself look behind him.  
  
“Dean.”  
  
Dean turned. Castiel wore the costume of a respectable suburban husband and father far more convincingly than Dean ever could. Some version of his suit and trench coat was probably hanging in a closet on this very street. And yet, if one of Michelangelo’s angels had gotten down off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it wouldn’t have looked more utterly out of place than Cas did under the yellow glare of the street lamp.  
  
“What’s happened?” Dean asked. “Is it Bobby?” It was the only news Dean could think of that Cas would deliver personally. It was impossible to tell from Cas’s expression. The world could be ending, again, and he’d still stare Dean down with the exact same impassive gaze. He tilted his head to the side like a sparrow, like a lizard, like nothing human.  
  
“Bobby is well,” Cas said, seeming confused.  
  
“Then what are you doing here?” Dean demanded, sick with dread. “What’s gone wrong now?”  
  
Cas’s mouth opened once, and closed. “I happened across a network of witches in southern Indiana,” he said, after a beat. “I believe they’re planning something big.”  
  
When Cas had left Dean, only hours after . . . . When Cas had left Dean, he’d made it abundantly clear that he’d fulfilled whatever obligation he felt that he had to his charge. He’d even lifted his hand print from Dean’s arm, as if to insure there would be no confusion: Dean was officially someone else’s problem.  
  
Dean had never known how to feel about it. He’d cut ties with his old life when he’d gone to Lisa; it wasn’t as if he’d planned to invite Cas over for Thanksgiving. Part of him had been relieved that he didn’t have to be the one to say it, the way he had with Bobby. Another part of him had been hurt that Cas could so casually erase the physical symbol of Dean’s rescue from Hell on his way out the door. Both parts were pissed that, after such a final goodbye, Cas had shown up again, not five months later, because he wanted Dean to do something for him.  
  
“I’m retired, Cas, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Dean said. “What’re you telling me for? Just smite the bitches.”  
  
Cas stepped closer, deep inside Dean’s personal space, same as always. “Some of them are in high school. The youngest is thirteen. Would you like me to kill them all?” It was sharp, but it was hard to know how much of it was sarcasm. Dean had the feeling that if he said yes, there’d be a lot of dead girls in the news tomorrow.  
  
“No. Jesus. I don’t know. The world’s full of hunters. Why don’t you talk to Bobby?”  
  
“Bobby’s asleep,” Cas said flatly.  
  
Dean didn’t want to smile, but he did, a little. It was such a Cas answer. Anyone else looking for help from a belligerent drunk at 2am would’ve had the sense to say something flattering about Dean’s skills.  
  
“I’m touched that I’m your second choice,” Dean said. “But it’s not like getting his beauty sleep is going to make Bobby any prettier. If this is really a five alarm crisis why the fuck didn’t you wake him up?”  
  
Cas sighed. “It’s not a ‘five alarm crisis,’ as you say. I know you’re retired. I didn’t expect you to hunt them yourself. I just thought that you’d know the right people to tell.”  
  
“And that’s worth showing up at 2am?” Dean didn’t know what Cas wanted, but it had to be more complicated than a bunch teen witches. “I thought we were through.”  
  
There was a long silence. Cas studied him with his unreadable, stolen eyes. “Through?” he asked coolly. “I didn’t realize our friendship only lasted as long as I kept dying for you on a regular schedule.”  
  
Dean winced. There was a sliver of truth in that, but it wasn’t the reaction that he’d expected. “Don’t play the martyr card with me. I invented that shit. You know that’s not what I meant. You left to play sheriff. You took your hand print off me. I figured it was your screwed up angel way of saying ‘peace out.’”  
  
Cas’s posture relaxed by a degree. “My hand print?” he asked, brow furrowed.  
  
“Is gone,” Dean said. Cas continued to stare at him blankly. “After you healed me at Stull Cemetery.”  
  
“Oh,” Cas said. He sounded mildly surprised. “I healed you quickly. I suppose I must have reset your body. I wasn’t aware that I’d removed my hand print.” He was completely casual, like it was a minor detail that he’d overlooked. Knowing that it was an accident hurt Dean more than when he’d thought that it was a deliberate period at the end of their friendship. At least then it had implied interest.  
  
Dean took a swig from his bottle, and continued down the road. Cas followed, walking a little too close. It was less the intimacy of an old friend, and more the instinct of a soldier who expected to find himself under attack at every turn. Dean wondered if the town made Cas nervous, too. He offered Cas the bottle of Jim Beam. Cas took it and drained a couple of fingers of whiskey.  
  
“The ability to get drunk is the one thing I miss about falling,” Cas said. He sloshed the amber liquid around in the bottle and gazed at it contemplatively.  
  
“Yeah.” Dean took the bottle back. “I couldn’t face life sober,” he admitted.  
  
“I have no choice.”  
  
The two of them were approaching the park by Morse lake. The outlines of a slide and a merry-go-round stood out against the night sky. Dean glanced over at Cas. He had his shoulders up, as if here were bracing himself against the force of some terrible storm.  
  
Dean imagined inviting Cas into Lisa’s house, asking him over to dinner some night, as if he were just one more affable construction worker. Cas would never agree to it. Even at the best of times, he’d rarely shown up without some compelling purpose.  
  
And if he Cas did come, out of loyalty, or obligation, or whatever else it was that drove him, it would be a disaster. Cas was too peculiar, too alien, too much himself. Drop Cas into the middle of a Saturday night barbecue, and the guys from the construction site would stare at him almost as hard as he would stare at them. And there Dean would be, stuck on the wrong side of normal again, feeling as awkward around his new friends as Cas looked, the two of them a pair of freaks set up for ridicule.  
  
The window through which Dean had crawled into his new life was so small that he’d had to strip himself bare to squeeze through. The Impala was under a tarp, and his father’s leather jacket had been tossed impulsively into the pile for Good Will. He hadn’t spoken to Bobby since a week after he’d turned up on Lisa’s doorstep. Cas was too big to consider.  
  
The pain that lived in Dean’s chest twisted in on itself, and flared up to a scalding heat. Dean missed the smell of burned coffee in Bobby’s kitchen. He missed the purr of the Impala’s engine as she opened up on the highway. He missed the garbled bit during “Stairway to Heaven” where the tape had worn thin on his cassette of  _Led Zeppelin IV_. He missed the way that Cas’s tie always ended up backwards, no matter how many times he restored his clothes. Above all, he missed, God, he missed . . . . But Dean couldn’t let himself think about that. It was the void that his thoughts constantly circled, but he dared not look at it directly. The whiskey was supposed to stop him from gazing into the abyss. It wasn’t doing its job too well, tonight.  
  
They walked in silence, until they were off the road, and down among the trees by the lakeshore. Dean’s body felt like a straitjacket. He wanted to claw off his skin, he wanted to crack open his rib cage and escape. He turned on Cas, instead.  
  
“You write your name on me, you wipe me clean,” Dean said. His voice was startlingly loud in the night air. “My body’s like a fucking dry erase board to you.”  
  
Cas clenched his fists, and then looked down at them, surprised, like they belonged to another man, and opened them again. “We’d just won the war. Thirty seconds earlier I’d been killed by Lucifer and resurrected by God. You were bleeding into your brain. I’m sorry that in that moment, I wasn’t thinking about your  _scars_.”  
  
Part of Dean wanted to take a swing at Cas, wanted to burn his rage out with a good fight, the way he used to do, before he’d settled down and stopped going to bars where good fights were on the menu. But he also knew that punching Cas wouldn’t get him anything but a broken hand a bemused look.  
  
He kissed Cas, instead, planting his hands on Cas’s shoulders and shoving him backward. For an instant, the body against him was as hard and immoveable as marble, the way Cas always was when he was too surprised to imitate human responses. Dean figured the odds were evenly split between Cas kissing back, and Cas knocking his teeth out. Fuck or fight; either was fine with Dean.  
  
The next instant, Cas was pliant, and Dean slammed him back into a tree with a force that could’ve cracked a human’s rib. Cas didn’t even wince. Dean clawed at Cas the way he wanted to claw at himself, pulling his head back by the hair to expose the long line of his throat and biting down hard enough to bruise. It must’ve hurt, but Cas’s low whimper was unmistakably pleasure. Dean grabbed him under the arms and pushed him upward against the tree until his feet were all but off the ground. Cas wrapped his legs around Dean’s waist, and Dean felt Cas hard against his thigh. Dean found the drag of Cas’s weight anchoring, but it wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy the violence inside him. He needed Cas to push back, but Cas was passive, the hand resting on Dean’s neck light, almost tentative, like Cas didn’t know how to respond. He probably didn’t.  
  
They’d done this before, a handful of times. Dean took Cas’s virginity a week after their failed visit to the brothel, in an act that fell somewhere between a favor, a joke, and a stupid, drunken mistake. They’d never talked about it, but in the months that followed, it kept happening. Dean would get bored, and drunk, and decide to play ‘debauch the angel,’ or he’d be depressed, and in need of something stronger than whiskey to distract him or, later, they’d both be depressed, and their complaints would flow into a fast, desperate hook-up. Dean had always been gentle, and a little distant, like Cas was an innocent girl he could frighten if he pushed too hard. Cas had no precedent for sex like this.  
  
Dean pressed his lips to Cas’s ear. “Hurt me,” Dean hissed. Cas struggled to focus his eyes on Dean, and when he did, he just looked confused. Fuck. Dean felt like he might die, or scream, or cry. “Hurt me,” Dean insisted. “ _Hurt me_.” He meant it to sound like a command, but it came out like begging.  
  
Cas’s eyes turned cold and assessing. He unwrapped his legs from around Dean’s waist, and shoved Dean to the ground. Dean clutched at Cas’s trench coat as he fell, and brought him tumbling on top. The grass by the lake was soft and muddy, but Dean’s head still struck with a jarring force that rattled his skull. It was good, it was almost enough.  
  
Cas had ripped off Dean’s shirt, and the button on his jeans, by the time Dean recovered. Cas’s teeth were locked around his nipple, tugging with a force that sent an electrical shock of pain out to Dean’s fingertips. Dean grabbed him around the waist and rolled them over. They both struggled, Dean leaving raw bite marks on Cas’s throat, Cas raising welts on Dean’s bare back with his fingernails, until Dean pinned Cas and held his wrists down above his head with one hand.  
  
It was a joke, and Dean knew it. Cas could snap his arm off without a second thought, but he was resisting Dean’s grip with exactly the right amount of force that Dean could just barely hold him down. Dean tugged Cas’s tie loose and brandished it like a prize before shredding the cheap plastic buttons off his shirt and shoving it back, as far off Cas’s shoulders as he could without letting go of his wrists.  
  
Cas toed off his shoes and Dean shoved his suit pants down and off, leaving Cas naked against the frame of his trench coat. Dean had always made him take the coat off, before, and insured that it was safely out of sight. For Dean, it bespoke Cas’s angelic nature as surely as any set of wings. Fucking Cas on the coat meant that he wasn’t just screwing around with a socially incapable friend, he was sticking it to an angel of the lord. It felt wrong, and twisted, and it made Dean unbearably hard. He shoved down what was left of his shredded jeans, and folded Cas in two, until his knees were up against his chest, and his head was tipped back, toward the sky. He looked utterly helpless. It made Dean want to tear him apart.  
  
“Right pocket,” Cas gasped. Dean fished out the tube of lube from Cas’s coat and almost laughed. He wondered if Cas had shown up with it, just in case it proved necessary, or if he could make it appear whenever he needed it. Dean smoothed some onto his fingers, and thrust them roughly inside Cas. Cas bucked up, testing the strength of Dean’s hold without breaking it.  
  
Dean kept Cas’s hands pinned down with his left hand, and lined himself up with his right. As much as he needed this, he hesitated. “We’re good?” he said, like it was really possible that he was holding Cas down against his will.  
  
“Just do it already,” Cas snapped. Dean pushed in, and Cas’s back arched like a bow. He was wild under Dean’s body, a primal force that Dean could barely control. He struggled in Dean’s grasp, digging his nails into Dean’s wrists. He kept demanding  _more_ , and  _harder_ , even though Dean was already fucking him hard enough that it edged into pain. They didn’t so much kiss as push their tongues desperately into each other’s mouths.  
  
Dean felt tension pooling at the base of his spine, and slid his free hand between them to stroke Cas. Cas made a sweet little overwhelmed whimper around Dean’s tongue, and bit down on Dean’s bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. For an instant, the pain was so sharp and white that it blotted out everything else, and Dean came in that moment of freedom. Cas murmured something that Dean didn’t understand, and spilled on Dean’s hand with a single, shuddering breath.  
  
Dean’s orgasm receded like a wave, taking his rage with it. He felt empty and clean, like a shell left behind on the shore. He was suddenly aware of the freezing air against his sweaty skin. He didn’t know how much it was the cold, and how much it was the crash from his adrenaline high, but he was shaking hard.  
  
“You can let go now, Dean,” Cas said softly, and Dean realized that he was still clutching Cas’s wrists. His hand might as well have belonged to someone else. He had no idea how to open it. Cas broke Dean’s grasp carefully, and rolled them over on their sides, face to face, the coat wrapped around them. He pressed Dean against his warm chest and held onto him until his shivering subsided.  
  
Cas pulled back, ever so slightly, so that he could see Dean’s face. He ran his fingers tenderly across the bite marks on Dean’s neck, and the raw scratches down his back. He swiped his forefinger across Dean’s bottom lip, and then replaced it with his tongue, lapping at the drop of blood that welled there. Cas seemed fascinated by the myriad tiny wounds he’d left on Dean’s body, and for a few minutes Dean was content to be studied. He found one of his hands resting on Cas’s discarded tie, and he started to twist it around his own wrists, over and over, comforted by it like a child would be by a doll. He and Cas had never lain together like this before. In the past, they’d always been up and dressed as soon as they finished.  
  
There was a rustle in the trees behind them, and Dean’s brain turned on again, straight into fight or flight mode. He tensed, ready to take on anything that might come at them out of the shadows. He craned his neck, heart hammering, but he couldn’t find the source of the sound.  
  
“It’s the wind, Dean,” Cas said gently.  
  
Dean knew Cas was right–how could an angel be wrong about a thing like that?–but it shattered his brief moment of peace, and the world began to seep back into his mind. He wondered if he could convince Lisa that he’d been in fight. He doubted it. She wasn’t stupid, and you don’t generally get love bites from a bar brawl. He’d been so good until now, passing up the waitresses who made eyes at him, and that one of Lisa’s friends who’d offered to make him dinner when Lisa had to work late. This felt different, though. More like touching yourself in the dark, or a wet dream. It was too far removed from the rest of his life to count. He wasn’t sure whether Lisa or Cas had more right to be angry about that line of thought.  
  
Cas didn’t seem to notice that Dean’s afterglow had evaporated. He was still caressing Dean’s skin contentedly. His fingertips ghosted across Dean’s shoulder and then stopped. After a moment, his hand clasped Dean’s shoulder, and squeezed.  
  
“I could put it back.” Cas kept his voice neutral. “If it’s important to you.”  
  
“Like I said, I’m not your fucking dry erase board,” Dean said, more tired than angry. “It’s gone, Cas, so it’s gone. You can’t just slap it back on me now because you feel like it. It’s not the same.” Besides, he really didn’t need anything else to explain to Lisa.  
  
Cas sat up. “You weren’t happy when I put it on you. You weren’t happy when I took it off. You’re not happy when I offer to put it back. I don’t know what you want from me.”  
  
“Nothing,” Dean said, as he studied his ruined jeans, wondering whether there was enough of them left to wear on the walk home. “I just want you not to fuck up what I’ve got here.”  
  
Their eyes met, one last time. There was a sickening lurch in Dean’s reality, and he was fully dressed in undamaged clothes. His lip didn’t sting anymore. He guessed that all the other marks that Cas had left on his body were gone, too.  
  
It took Dean a moment to realize that he was still holding Cas’s tie in his hand. He wondered what it was supposed to mean. Was it a gift? Was it ‘fuck you, you don’t get to pretend this didn’t happen’? Hell, maybe it didn’t mean a goddamn thing, and Cas had sincerely forgotten it when he flapped off. If there was one thing that Dean had realized tonight, it was that he had no idea when Cas was being subtle, and when he was being oblivious.  
  
For one mad instant, Dean thought about keeping the tie. Lisa didn’t know that, back in his single days, the people he’d taken home from bars hadn’t always been women. Even if she found the tie, she wouldn’t suspect that it was from an old lover. If he couldn’t have the Impala, or his leather jacket, or his cassettes, or Bobby, or Cas, or . . . then surely he could have this one small thing.  
  
The next instant, he knew that it was a terrible idea. Leave any chink open to the past, and it would swallow him whole. He wrapped the tie around a stone, and threw it toward the center of the lake. He’d already turned to the road when he heard the splash. He could have sworn that something far bigger than a rock had hit the water. Or was crawling out of it. He didn’t look back this time, though. He knew there was nothing behind him.  
  
It was getting closer.


End file.
